Editorial: The Skin of Things

Abstract

Material perception — the visual perception of stuff — is an emerging field in vision science, as Filipp Schmidt states in this special issue on The Skin of Things. Remarkably, this can also be said for research in art history. In art studies there has been plenty of attention for the perception of space, depth cues, and various perspective systems to create 3D-worlds. One might almost call it an obsession – from White (1957) to Willats (1997), from Panofsky (1927) to Kubovy (1968). All the while, preciously little has been done on the recognition and rendering of stuff. It is not so easy to explain this situation − particularly when we look at the history of art. During approximately the last 500 hundred years of Western painting for instance, the rendering of material properties was of paramount importance for artist and audience alike. One can think of the reaction the Englishman John Pepys jotted down in his diary in 1669, upon viewing a flower still life by Simon Verelst. Here poppies and a tulip were delicately painted, each flower with the subtle surface characteristics of its petals: “I was forced again and again to put my finger to it to feel whether my eyes were deceived or not.” There are many more statements to indicate the wonderment and admiration painters could elicit when mastering material properties. From a critic in the 18th century we learn for instance how the 17th century painter Jan de Heem “... was praised especially for his desire to imitate gold and silver, [...] so natural that it seemed to be real gold and silver.” Indeed, De Heem’s fame and fortune were precisely based on such skills: refined visual evocations Jeroen Stumpel1,* and Maarten Wijntjes2,*